In 1963, the Tour de France organisers devised a route to discomfit Jacques Anquetil, who had just won the race for the third time. The time trial kilometrage was slashed and the mountain stages increased. It did not work: Anquetil took his fourth Tour in emphatic style. A similar process can be traced leading to Chris Froome’s fourth Tour win, sealed in Marseille in one of the most scenically beautiful and atmospheric stages the event has ever run.
This Tour route looked tailored for the young French hopeful Romain Bardet, he of the nerveless descending skills, more downhill skier than cyclist, but the outcome was the same as in 1963: the man who, on paper, was least favoured by the route, ended up the winner, taking his fourth Tour.
There were two schools of thought going into this Tour. One held that the new format would result in a nervous, open race. The other that the race would be conservative and tense, with most of the contenders watching and waiting for the final two key stages: Thursday’s finish on the Izoard and Saturday’s time trial. These past three weeks have tended towards the latter, a few flurries from Daniel Martin and Simon Yates apart.
Froome lost time in the mountains, for the first time in his winning run, to Bardet and Rigoberto Urán. Thanks to their stage wins, they fared slightly better than Froome when it came to securing time bonus seconds. Most tellingly of all, on every mountain stage apart from Peyragudes, the trio finished within 10 seconds of each other. A Tour designed with a bare minimum of time trialling has been won in the time trial stages in Düsseldorf and Marseille.
Froome’s rivals will reflect on missed opportunities: at Chambéry, where Froome had a mechanical issue, Fabio Aru attacked and Richie Porte made the opposition wait for the race leader. There was no particular reason for them to do so, other than a decidedly tenuous convention that, in certain circumstances, the maillot jaune should be given leeway.
More conventionally, on the super-short mountain stage to Foix, none of the riders who had seen Froome’s weakness at first hand the previous day (at Peyragudes) made a real effort to test him. No one was quite certain what his issue had been and it would surely have been worth seeing what the after-effects were.
Most glaringly, however, when he suffered a broken spoke at the foot of the Col de Peyra Taillade en route to Le Puy-en-Velay, none of the leaders attempted to go clear of the main group on the climb. It was a perfect opportunity because – for perhaps the only time in the Tour – Team Sky were in disarray. It is hard to imagine Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx or Lance Armstrong letting such an opportunity slip away.
Froome won in the style of Anquetil, managing his time gaps, marking his rivals. He owed an immense amount to his team. Among his daily rituals, one was never missed: massive heartfelt thanks to the other riders in white Sky jerseys.
One rival team manager summed up the opposition’s frustration. “Sky have a world time-trial champion [Vasil Kiryienka] who can ride in the valleys. They have a former world road champion [Michal Kwiatkowski] who can bury himself on pretty much any climb. And they have a guy [Mikel Landa] who is capable of winning the Tour who can stay with Chris when the going gets tough.
“There are people asking why the top guys on general classification don’t attack Chris – but they would need to be putting out a zillion watts to do that.”
It is when you turn to Team Sky, however, that Froome’s triumph becomes complicated. Four wins is a massive achievement, the moment when a rider suddenly attains greatness. There should be huge excitement around a feat that places a rider in the same bracket as Hinault, Merckx, Miguel Indurain and Anquetil, but that was hard to detect here.
On Saturday, the Tour was relegated to page 12 of l’Equipe. There was little Froome love in evidence. A few boos en route to Le Puy-en-Velay and some whistling on Saturday apart, there has been no antipathy either, unlike other years, but it seems that Froome is only slowly winning over the French.
“He’s the victim of Sky’s image to some extent,” says Jean Montois, who has covered 35 Tours for Agence France-Presse. “After Wiggins, everyone emphasised the dehumanised side of Team Sky but Froome has everything that should make him popular: he’s polite, he’s fair play, he makes an effort to talk French.
“Like in all sports, the public doesn’t like a team that crushes everyone else. If he had lost one of his Tours by 15sec, he’d be very popular. I can sense small changes, however; last year was better than 2015 and this year that’s continued.”
The questions regarding Team Sky remain. They do not touch Froome directly, but are bound to detract from his moment of triumph. Having announced during the Tour that he will ride a further two years at Sky, he and the squad are bound together. The issues unveiled in the past nine months, at the centre of UK Anti-Doping’s inquiry into allegations of possible wrongdoing, make a grim list, starting with 55 doses of the performance-enhancing corticosteroid triamcinolone acquired between 2010 and 2013, with no clear explanation of what it was all used for; Froome, however, has told the Guardian he did not use any of the triamcinolone and was not offered any.
Add in the delivery of testosterone patches to the then team doctor Richard Freeman, claimed to have been a mistake; allegations of widespread use of the painkiller tramadol; curiously timed Therapeutic Use Exemptions for Wiggins, coinciding with major target events. All this on top of the hiring of a doctor, Geert Leinders, who is now banned for life for misdeeds connected with his previous team, Rabobank.
This relates to a period between five and six years ago, but the issues remain unresolved, with the Ukad inquiry yet to be completed.
Here is the conundrum of Froome 4.0. Being expected to celebrate a clinically taken victory, forged with the help of one of the most complete team performances the Tour has seen, is one thing. Being expected to do so against Sky’s background is like being asked to dance at a wedding when the groom’s previous wife disappeared in unexplained circumstances.
Like it or not, want it or not, however much one might admire Froome’s management of the race, relishing this success is somehow hard to do.
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